The comments infuriated many Democrats, who rose to speak for the bill. The most eloquent was Del. Melvin L. Stukes (D-Baltimore), who spoke with the fervor of a preacher. He compared opposition to undocumented students with the 1700s view of slaves as less than human.

The three-fifths thing has always annoyed me. It was the slaveowners who wanted slaves counted, for purposes of electoral apportionment, as equal to free men. It was the free states that objected. Slaves would have been better off being counted as zero for electoral purposes, since it was their owners who had the vote, and who would benefit by having extra pro-slavery congressmen.

But as of 2007, an illegal alien is not counted as three-fifths of citizen, for purposes of electoral apportionment. Nor as zero, which is what you might expect the Census to do. For purposes of electoral apportionment, he's counted exactly the same as if he were a citizen. See the first thing I ever wrote for VDARE.com, more than six years ago:Immigration’s Rotten Borough dynamic...